Quote:Dark mirror? No. Grey mirror, to both of us. Quincy succombed at the end to his own propaganda -- he discovered he enjoyed being the villain more than he actually wanted his ultimate goal -- but he did it to start a golden age. Or rather, a silver age. He created a dark, deadly world in the hopes that it would spontaneously turn into the DC comics universe circa 1968-1890 -- he was a good (if twisted, no argument there) man who chose evil tools for what was more or less a good end.
Now, here's James D. Quincy, presented as in some ways a dark mirror of Doug. And a gamer, to boot. And I'm wondering how much of that is really a dark mirror of Robert M. Schroeck, and if so, what was it like to write such an anti-you?
Similarly, Doug is also grey -- a "superhero" with no compunctions about killing and a raft of obnoxious behaviors and destructive habits; he tries to be noble but views himself as a soldier where being such is often at odds with nobility. He has honor, but it's a strictly personal honor, and it can take him some weird places.
And I'm similarly grey -- only not to the same scale as either of them. By the definitions of my own hard-earned ethics, I am more evil than I would like to be, which made it easy to extrapolate myself into both of them. Admittedly, I've been "inside" Doug's head far longer, but when you stop and think about it, I've been inside Quincy's for six years. I'd've had to have all the empathy of a rock not to identify with both at one time or another.
I think trying to assign a dark-light polarization here is terribly misleading. Think instead of an equilateral triangle -- and each point is the same shade of grey but a different texture.
As such, Quincy isn't an anti-Bob or an anti-Doug, but just another point plotted in a cloudy range of possible values for my personality. God knows if I didn't the same kind of "world-building" impulse Quincy did, I wouldn't be writing DW. Or anything else for that matter. But I do, I just do it in a different way.
Quote:My official, complete and utterly true answer to that, Sam, is that I never intended to tell that story -- so I never planned anything for it. I did, for my purposes, consider Quincy permanently dead. (Likewise Largo; since Crash was "canon" for the purposes of DW2, my reasoning was: had Largo had a better body to move to before Crash he surely would have done so. He didn't, therefore when that body was killed, that was it for him. QED) But again, I'm not telling that story, so what I think doesn't necessarily matter.
Quincy's body may be dead, but I do not and cannot believe that Quincy is gone. He'd have braintapes, private cloning facilities, his own version of the boomer-brain transfer process, something to allow him to pull off the classic Return from the Grave. And, Bob, if you say he didn't... well, I'll have no choice but to accuse you of lying.
-- Bob
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There's no wrong way to eat a Rhesus.